Love Lies Bleeding review: The best grubby, bloody lesbian thriller of the season

The best grubby, bloody, vaguely sub-Coen period lesbian thriller of the season turns out to the be the one with no actual Coen involvement. Whereas Ethan Coen’s Drive-Away Dolls got exhaustingly caught up in its own cutesy-pie snark, Love Lies Bleeding is an altogether more robust specimen. The film will take you around the back of the shack and give you a few sharp kicks to the head. If that Coen comparison is of any value (and it probably isn’t) it takes in the viscera-filtered noir of Blood Simple and the nihilistic abandon of No Country for Old Men. But scrappy. And funny. And sexy.

Rose Glass rides on no other film-makers’ shoulders. Five years ago the English woman broke through with Saint Maud, a searing religious horror, and now, as many Europeans have before, builds on home acclaim to have a crack at high Americana. It is 1989 and we are in a blistering, unkind corner of New Mexico. Kristen Stewart, as so often, hiding sensitivity behind a bluster of shrugs, plays the grumpy Louise Langston, first seen unblocking a graphically overflowing lavatory in a low-rent gym. Anna Baryshnikov, teeth yellow as overripe banana skins, plays Daisy, a clingy admirer who later comes close to going full-on stalker.

It is the sort of grim environ that Jim Thompson enjoyed exploiting in his literary pulp: cheap booze, hurried sex and improvised corruption. You can always do with Ed Harris in such situations, and, as Lou, Louise’s kingpin father, he does a good job of not being outacted by the maddest hair in recent cinema.

You just know some stranger is going to ride into town and shake up the unstable equilibrium. Here it is Katy O’Brian as a volatile bodybuilder, Jackie Cleaver. She ends up with a job at Lou’s shooting range and a space in Louise’s bed. Played with the presence of an ambulatory tree, Jackie comes across as an erratic sort even before Lou hips her on to steroids. Thereafter, the slightest provocation can provoke tornadoes of fury. Eventually, an act of extreme violence – graphically depicted – sends all characters scurrying in all directions.

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Could you tell a non-American had made this film if you didn’t already know? Maybe not. But the wallowing in a particular class of borderland decline feels like something you’d expect from a dazzled outsider. The Berlin Wall is about to fall. The larger American car is still about the place. Such isolated locales could still behave as if the rest of the universe didn’t exist. All the currency of postwar noir is here. Lou is prepared to solve any problem with a bullet and a silencer. Louise and Jackie couple in an atmosphere of growing unease as the FBI circle. Ben Fordesman’s cinematography trades in neon even when no such illuminated signs are present.

One might reasonably wonder if those pieces all fit together. The late-stage collapse into near magic realism is not a problem – grand metaphors are plainly at work here – but the inconsistency on the ground is more of a worry. The absurdly hirsute Lou spends days at the back of a decaying warehouse but looks to live in a sort of mansion. A sequence in Las Vegas seems bolted on.

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What keeps it ticking is the fiery gut-clenched romance between the two leads. There are cunning games being played here. Jackie, the sensitive fugitive, is also the hulking brute, the unhoused weapon. Louise, initially impotent, is forced into becoming the force for change, the quiet alpha female. One can scarcely imagine anyone else but Stewart making sense of the role. Like all the great noir actors, she has carved her own space – one accommodating a character who is inventive, open, but ultimately ruthless.

Not for the timid.

Love Lies Bleeding is in cinemas from Friday, May 3rd